Session Abstract

We're increasingly confronted with three synergistic challenges -- stovepiped application stacks are giving way to 'best of breed' application ecosystems just as users begin to recognize the value of federated identity, which in turn faces challenges interoperating with social and cloud identity models. Maintaining some semblance of a seamless single-signon experience in this new environment stretches both the use of sibilant fricatives and our traditional identity strategies. Duke University encountered these issues while planning for a transition from a more traditional 'all-in-one' LMS from Blackboard to a more 'best of breed' solution employing Sakai. In this session, we'll discuss our strategy for blending enterprise, federated, and social identities across multiple cooperating applications in enterprise, hosted, and potentially even 'cloud-sourced' scenarios, focusing on our approach to SAML coexistence with social identities using Shibboleth, Grouper, and some locally-developed tools. Meanwhile, an internet2 middleware project, SocialIdentity (https://spaces.internet2.edu/display/socialid/Home ), has been drafting a recipe for institutional use of both social and SAML identity providers. A co-chair of SocialIdentity will present core findings from the current draft version.